Friday, April 04, 2014

A puzzling reading experience, this one.The proof comes replete with glowing recommendations from Nathan Filer (winner of this year’s Debut Costa for The Shock of the Fall) and Samantha Harvey (of The Wilderness fame), and it has been long-listed for the Desmond Elliott Prize this week.But I struggled to get through it: 374 pages dragged by and I had to bribe myself to keep up a steady pace.It wasn’t that I was disappointed or bored as such (although I was a little bit of both); it was more that I was defeated.Defeated by the claustrophobic languor that is integral to the way the book is structured, plotted and peopled, and defeated by the Big Emotions I was clearly supposed to be having and wasn't.

I relished the languor at first and really enjoyed the honesty of the prose.The story begins in July 1940 with eleven year old Lydia Pendell walking towards her parent’s house through a deserted Suffolk village.She is a runaway evacuee, desperate to get away from the Welsh mountains where she has been sent and back to her family.It is a dramatically, apocalyptically hot summer day and everyone Lydia knows seems to have completely disappeared.The streets are deserted, the shop and school are boarded up and Greyfriars, the house where Lydia has lived all her life, is empty and dark. Everyone, from her mother to her pet rabbit, has vanished.

The house smelt unfamiliar.Her feet creaked over the floorboards and the oak panelling was cool to her touch.All the doors from the hallway were closed and she opened them one by one, finding the rooms dark and musty, the fixtures and furnishings indistinct.All the windows were filled with blackout frames.

There are no toothbrushes in the bathroom, no clothes in the wardrobes.Having held her nerve on the lonely complicated train journey, she bursts into tears and locks herself in the attic. She alternates between terror – everyone has been gassed to death! – and half-hearted explanations.Her fear and her attempts to quell it feel real.When, late into the night, Lydia hears someone moving around the house the tension is palpable. When that someone turns out to be a wounded German soldier called Heiden, who holds a pistol to Lydia’s sleeping head before taking her hostage, the suspense becomes delicious.

In hindsight those first 60 pages have the feel of well-trod beloved ground, shaped and smoothed and made good by successive drafts in a way that later parts are not. After this initial promise, it was another 100 pages before I started to wonder if The Dynamite Room was going anywhere much at all.

Trapped together in the sweltering house, the pair become an odd couple.Heiden (who speaks almost perfect English) claims that the German invasion is well underway but that he will protect Lydia so long as she doesn’t leave the house.Lydia has no reason to disbelieve him, and so they agree a truce, spending time together: she makes him a bed, he plays music using her father’s saw.The point of view alternates between them and there are fascinatingly disturbing moments in their captor-captive dynamic.After Heiden hits her Lydia thinks it would be alright if she had to marry him, while he imagines a future in which she is his adopted daughter.

It’s gets claustrophobic very quickly, with just these two characters gingerly stepping around one another.There isn’t a great deal of room for incident.But, in spite of this inbuilt sparseness, the story starts to get baggy and repetitive where it should be taut and precise.Great swathes of text are given over to flashbacks that gradually reveal Heiden’s real purpose, and each time we flick to the past a little bit of the tension in the present is lost. It's like being told you have to stay in a small airless room and then being let out every hour to wander around somewhere else: a German park, or a Norweigian wood, or the beach in Dieppe.

Another problem, I think, lies in the way each memory is treated like a piece of Heiden's character, so that he is gradually built into, rather than revealed to be, the person we know by the end.The memories don’t uncover or recover things about him, they actively shape him into the damaged man Hewitt needs him to be.They don’t feel like events that have happened just because they happened, but like events that need to have happened to make the plot work.So, there is a rape, the murder of children, the accidental death of a lover witnessed by terrible coincidence.Heiden’s life is retrofitted, rather than preconceived; the memories were made for him not from him.Which means that he is increasingly difficult to believe in – much more difficult than Lydia, who has a less doctored past – and becomes a bogeyman.Everyone knows that bogeymen aren’t real and can’t really hurt you. The peril gone, I was disillusioned and lost interest.

I made myself read to the end since I'd got so far, and there was some reward in doing it. It was good to spend more time with Lydia - I think the book would have worked better for me if her's had been the only point of view - and I really did like the final 10 pages, even if they didn't feel earned. But you know a book hasn't been for you when reaching the acknowledgements page is a relief.

Wednesday, March 19, 2014

I didn't realise how long it had been since I last posted. Over a month. Ahem. So much for my new year resolution to write more frequently. Better get back on the horse.

While I've been away the OrangeBailey's Prize for Women's Fiction longlist has been announced, and what an excitingly rounded list it seems. I've read The Luminaries so far, and have Burial Rites by Hannah Kent and All the Birds Singing by Evie Wyld waiting in the wings. Of the others I'm keen to get my mitts on The Signature of All Things, Reasons She Goes to the Woods and Americanah. I was a little disappointed not to see Karen Jay Fowler's rather wonderful and intense We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves on the list. I finished it in the week before the long list was announced and honestly thought it was a foregone conclusion that it would be in the running.

But enough distraction, really I wanted to blog something brief and glowing about Jo Fletcher's Longbourn. What a sweet and melliflous book it is! It's one of those sequels to Pride and Prejudice, except not really. Rather than picking up the life threads of Lizzy and Darcy, Jane and Bingley, Lydia and Wickham, Longbourn peeps below stairs to tell the story of their servants and runs parallel to the main story. The people who make Austen's world of languid leisure and love-making possible - the housekeeper Mrs Hill and housemaid Sarah, the footman mentioned just once in Chapter 3 and of the nameless second housemaid - are brought out of the shadows. Their wishes, desires and heartaches are foregrounded, while the famous characters above-stairs are almost silent.

Sarah, the Bennet's housemaid of all work - laundress, assistant cook, seamstress, hairdresser, letter-carrier - has lived a quiet life. Adopted into the house as a child her world is a small one, reaching only as far as Meryton in one direction and the drover's road that runs past Longbourn in the other. She is most intimately acquainted with the inside of the laundry kettle. In a house full of adult women there is always washing to be done. She wryly observes that if Lizzy Bennet had the washing of her own petticoats she wouldn't coat them six inches deep in mud.

The arrival of Mr Bingley and co (and the Militia of course) is as much of a shake-up for her as it is for the women who unwittingly run her ragged. Bingley brings his own servants with him - a shadow army to run Netherfield- and amongst them the charming Ptolemy Bingley, a freed slave from the family plantation (and possibly Bingley's own illegitimate brother). He is unlike anybody that Sarah has ever met before, and immediately interesting. He fills her mind with London, and faraway hot places, and turns her head in a way that Mrs Hill most definitely does not approve of.

At the same time the mysterious James Smith turns up at Longbourn and somehow convinces Mr Bennet to take him on as footman. He is taciturn and unflinching, infuriating in both his application to his work and his refusal to give Sarah a second glance. She's a bright girl - she borrows books from Mr B - and starved of interest, desperate for drama, she scents a conspiracy. She becomes convinced James is hiding something and she means to find out what it is...

What with Ptolemy in and out of the kitchen with messages for the ladies upstairs, and James' tantalising secret, Sarah has very few thoughts to spare for the love lives of the Bennet sisters. The reader knows that Lizzy has been snubbed by Darcy and wooed by Wickham and is in emotional turmoil, but Sarah doesn't register it. Just as Lizzy has no access to Sarah's mental world in Pride and Prejudice, so Sarah has no access to Lizzy's in Longbourn. The name Darcy doesn't even appear until page 263, and then barely in passing. He is as remote from Sarah's life as she from his. Bingley in this novel is a footman; and the Bingley family is tainted by a fortune made in sugar and the slave trade. It is a useful corrective, giving us an alternative route into Austen's textual world. In Longbourn, Mr Collins is a bumbling pleasant man eager to be pleased; he is kind to Sarah, and she thinks of him fondly. His marriage to Charlotte Lucas is judged to be excellent good fortune, not only because Lizzy would have been a disastrous mismatch but because Miss Lucas is fond of Mrs Hill and unlikely to turf the servants out when Collinses inherit Longbourn.

If you know Pride and Prejudice well, and if you like it, all of this play with beloved characters and events is charming and fun. This isn't the only reason to recommend Longbourn though. The writing is delicious, teasing, intimate and my greatest moment-by-moment pleasure while I was reading it. Jo Baker hasn't tried to imitate Austen's ascerbic wit. Instead she has gone for a dreamy tactile sort of prose, and played to her strength. Which is, rather unexpectedly, nature writing. The servants live in a world where the weather, the seasons, birds and growing things form the key points of interest. There are no grand vistas, no sophisticated paintings or fashions, no music, except those things that are barely glimpsed or overheard in passing. Longbourn is a different way of seeing an overly familiar period world. It's got proper commitment to it's concept, beyond the initial conceit, which is why I think I liked it so very much.

The Fish Can Sing wasn't the book I was expecting. When I read Laxness' extraordinary sheep-farming epic Independent PeopleI was overwhelmed and unsettled. It has stayed with me over the years, growing more majestic and psychologically acute in my mind. That novel - especially the first 2/3 of it - is a great cosmic shout, a conjuring of both the grandeur and limitations of human life. The Fish Can Sing is a different kind of book altogether: a satirical touchingly eccentric bildungsroman set in early 20th century Reykjavik. It is tender, philosophical and deeply moralistic, and occasionally mad as a box of frogs. See, for example, the chapter on whether shaving is evil or a social good.

Our narrator Alfgrimur grows up in a lowly turf cottage on the croft at Brekkukot, on the outer edge of the town that will become Reykjavik. He is looked after by Bjorn of Brekkukot, his 'grandfather', and a woman he knows as his 'grandmother'. They are no more his blood relations than they are husband and wife. This enigmatic pair offer their home as a sort of charitable boarding house for waifs and strays, taking in travellers with no where else to go and poor migrant families on their way to America. People come to give birth or die there, all together in the sleeping loft with only a hankerchief size window to let in the light. Alfgrimur's mother, whoever she was, left her baby behind there and disappeared forever.

He is raised collectively by a band of outcasts and misfits - a blind ship's captain; the 'superintendent' of the harbour toilets; the first man to be run over by a motor-car in Iceland - in a sort of pre-capitalist, atheist Eden, where Bjorn of Brekkukot stands fast against a tide of change in Iceland. Bjorn is a fisherman with his own small boat and a handcart for selling his catch in the streets, one of the last of his kind. His living, and his entire way of life, is being destroyed by the big trawlers from Denmark and Norway with their great nets. Alfgrimur remembers him - from some future time when he has left Iceland himself - with enormous tenderness and respect. He recalls how his grandfather refused to price his catch according to the laws of supply and demand. Instead he would always charge the same for his fish whether they were abundant or scarce. He considered that the value of a fish was the value of a fish, and a man only needed so much money for the necessicities of life. Still people bought from Bjorn, even on days when his prices seemed high, because they believed his fish tasted better (presumably because of the added principles).

This elegiac note for simpler times runs throughout the book, because The Fish Can Sing is as much about the slow death of a way of life as it is about Alfgrimur's growing up into a bigger world. This world is starting to encroach and impact on Brekkukot at the same time as he is becoming aware of it and deciding how to make his way through it. The older Alfgrimur makes a sad affectionate shake-of-the-head for a time gone by, similar in some ways to Laxness' nostalgic sighing in Independent People. Although Bjatur of Summerhouses is a very different character to Bjorn of Brekkukot, they share an allegiance to a disappearing world and a gruff moral resistance to change. But in both books the next generation is inexorably driven into the future - Asta Sollija from Summerhouses, and Alfgrimur from Brekkukot.

Iceland's most famous son, the mysterious opera singer Gardar Holm, is the son of Bjorn''s neighbour, and an occasional visitor during Alfgrimur's childhood. He is apparently rich and successful, performing for Popes and Kings, and watching money grow and grow in his Swiss bank accounts, but proves strangely reluctant to sing in his home town or share stories of his life abroad. He choses to sleep in his mother's hay loft rather than in his hotel suite, and swaps his fancy patent shoes for Alfgrimur's boots. He is sometimes hysterical, apparently sickened by his contact with a less honest way of life. It isn't clear whether he is really famous or a fraud, a case of the Emperor's New Clothes. When he spots Alfgrimur's own talent for music - nurtured by the local pastor who pays him to sing at pauper's funerals - Gardar challenges him to discover the 'one true note', the pure way of living and expressing ones self that gets to the heart of things.

The 'one true note' haunts the adults of the book, apparently unattainable through wealth or influence. Although Alfgrimur is clever and comes top of his class at the local grammar school, he struggles to understand the riddle of it. He senses, perhaps correctly, that his grandfather and grandmother have discovered it through their way of life, and for a long time he is determined to become a fisherman and carry on their legacy at Brekkukot. Of course this is impossible, because that way of sounding the 'one true note' is almost gone; the croft is not a place out of time and the march of history is implacable. The 20th century is coming.

It turns out that in spite of their stylistic and tonal differences Independent People and The Fish Can Sing are sibling-novels after all. Laxness is exploring the same dilemma of change vs tradition. He was as haunted by the moral lure of nostalgia in 1957 as he was over 20 years earlier. Independent People is certainly the darker twin, and my favourite; the power of the writing, the rage and confusion of it, hits you over the head like a rock fall. Fish is the work of a writer more reconciled to his ideas; it grows in your mind, a stone cast in a pond. Oh how I relish the Laxness novels I have yet to come.

Thursday, February 06, 2014

Anna Hope has written a gorgeous, intimate first novel in Wake, with an emotional poise that many more seasoned writers would envy. It reminded me most strongly - in character and style - of Sarah Waters' The Night Watch, with something of Sebastian Barry's more elegiac novels mixed through. I was gripped from the epigraph, which simply gives definitions of the title:

wake

1 Emerge or cause to emerge from sleep

2 Ritual for the dead

3 Consequence or aftermath

The book's central characters are caught up in this various experience of 'waking' - although which kind is often unclear. The multiplicity of an apparently straightforward word points up the contested nature of the difficult past that haunts, frustrates or controls them all.

The year is 1920, and the scene is London; the date is the 7th of November. It is a Sunday. Across the channel in France a party of men have just unearthed the remains of an unknown soldier from an abandoned battlefield. In five days time on 11th November, Remembrance Day, this nameless man will be reburied with all state and honour in Westminster Abbey, a token of respect to all the Great War dead. Three women - Ada, Evelyn and Hettie - go about their day, in as usual a way as possible.

Ada is the eldest, in her mid-forties, isolated and prone to seeing the ghost of her son in the street. She obsesses over the paltry amount of information the War Office provided about his death in 1917, and is increasingly divorced from reality, and from her husband and her friends. She spends long hours walking around and around the trees in the local park, bewildered as to how or why everything continues on as before:

She comes to a stop, the only figure on this patch of grass, where the trees are purple against the sky. The first lights are coming on in the houses alongside the park, shapes moving at the windows, the women at work in their kitchens... It is odd standing here, looking from the outside at the rhythms and routines of life. It seems suddenly so clear. Some contract has been broken. Something has been ruptured. How have they all agreed to carry on?

Evelyn's life has also been ruptured. She lost her fiance, Fraser, in France and one of her own fingers in a munitions factory accident, and now spends long days in an office fielding complaints from veterans about their paltry pensions. While Ada is limp and apathetic in her grief, Evelyn is apoplectic with rage. She subjects herself to a punishing isolation, frustrated by a post-war spirit that is by turns cheerful and elegiac but always, she feels, dishonest. Her pensions job allows her to keep the war fresh, keep her indignation high and maintain the sense of her personal grief as justified and unique.

Then there is Hettie, whom the war has barely touched. Her older brother Fred came back unhurt - if a little quieter than before - and she was only seventeen when it ended. Now she works as a professional dancer at the glamourous Palais dance hall, partnering single men for 6p a time. She is sympathetic to the ones with false legs or who barely say a word, but she is also frustrated and resents these encounters with damage. She is waiting for her life to start. Excitement comes on 7th November in the form of Ed - rich, insouciant, charming - a man she meets in a jazz club.

The three women are unknown to one another and will never meet, but over the course of five days their stories touch as Hope weaves their three strands together. For me the joy of the book was getting to know them, in the intimacy of their own thoughts, as the countdown to Remembrance Day forces them to confront what the war has done to them and what it has meant for everyone around them.

Although Wake is about the individual, and the individual's experience in the aftermath of war, it is also about what is shared. The five sections of the book are opened and interrupted by brief vignettes from the points of view of someone who has contact with the unknown soldier as he travels on his last journey. The undertakers who prepare the body; the little girl who first spots the ship coming in; a family who stand silent as the funeral train passes the bottom of their garden; an Irish veteran pressed in amongst the Remembrance Day crowds. The impression is of the cacophony of thought and memory that make up a nation's response to a shocking collective experience. The thought of all those minds focused on one nameless man is extraordinarily powerful.

The book begs the question: what is individual about the war and post-war experience? What is the status or value of a single grief when placed in the context of the grief of a nation? It is quite startling to pan across the crowds that line London's streets on 11th November 1920 through Ada's eyes, or Evelyn's, and consider what it means that their personal loss stands alongside hundreds of thousands of others. No wonder Evelyn is determined to keep Fraser seperate in her mind. In this post-war world the shocking thing is not the tragedy of losing a son or husband or brother or father, but how that tragedy doesn't give you any special status. Loss is ubiquitious.

Hope's decision to tell her story through the female point of view is important for me. We don't have access to the thoughts of the men in the story, only to how they are seen and interpreted by Ada, Evelyn and Hettie. Unusually, and wonderfully, the women's thoughts and feelings aren't subsumed or consumed in their contact with men. When Hettie discovers (rather predictably) that Ed is not as carefree as she thought, and is harboring some war-time demons of his own, she doesn't give herself up to support or heal him. She isn't the typecast innocent who will save him from himself. Or rather, she decides not to be. She consciously resists the part:

She should touch him, she thinks. This is her job here. She should reach out and touch his arm. Say something to make him come back to himself. Rouse him to his manhood somehow. She thinks this, but she is angry, and this anger is a fierce, clear thing, and she does not.

This is one of the moments that convinces me that while Wake is an emotional novel, it isn't a sentimental one. It sets out to explore a cliche - the emotional wreckage of national loss - but ends up being as much about fizzing anger as grief.

It's not really myth-busting. There are no challenges to what we already know about the War here: the experience of the Front, the shooting of deserters, the generation of women left behind and the veterans struggling to fit back into peacetime lives. You could say that Ada, Evelyn and Hettie are all, to a greater or lesser extent, types, standing in for a whole nation of grieving mothers, wives, lovers, sisters and daughters. Yet Wake is still an alternative to the received narrative.

It seems to me that cliche is inevitable when you write about an experience writ so large in the national imagination. Wake expands and fills it out, brings to life the reality that made the cliche in the first place. It's a familiar story but doesn't take itself for granted. Hope doesn't rely on the familiarity of the situation to carry us through; she isn't ever lazy. Every encounter with her fictional world is carefully delineated; it's made up of ordinary things and household items and all the furniture of London's streets, drawn very precisely and with great texture. The writing is quite excellent - understated and measured. Most importantly it makes you feel something, by showing it to you from a different angle. Now and then I was startled to tears.

I'll remember you, he thinks, and as the gun carriage with its coffin and its dented helmet pass him by, he closes his eyes. Nothing will bring them back. Not the words of comfortable men. Not the words of politicians. Or the platitudes of paid poets. 'At the going down of the sun, we will remember them.' No. I will remember you when I pack my pipe. I will remember you when I lift my pint. I will remember you on fine days and on black ones. In the summer light, I will remember you.

I will remember you when I lift my pint? Indeed I will. A BBC adaptation is surely, and deservedly, on the horizon?

Tuesday, January 28, 2014

You, me and everyone we know heard a lot about this Australian debut last year. It went buzzing around the blogs, with lots of positive reviews from reviewers I trust. The paperback came out earlier this month and it seemed to be everywhere all over again; Waterstones have chosen it for their bookclub and stacked it high in my local store. So when I spotted it on Netgalley I thought I would take a punt, even though I had a niggling suspiscion that it wasn't going to be 100% for me. My instinct was both right and wrong.

I thoroughly enjoyed racing through it - it's the first book I've read in a day in quite some time - and I smiled often and giggled several times and once laughed out loud (the Jacket Incident, for anyone who has read it). I immediately warmed to Don Tillman, the genetics professor with Aspergers on the cusp of 40 whose life is efficiently segmented and timed to the second; and to his only two friends, Gene, the aging lothario 'collecting' women from around the world, and his suffering psychiatrist wife Claudia. The writing was accomplished and swift, the narrative voice insightful and tender.

But I found the story that Simison built from and around these good things entirely predictable and disappointing. When Don embarks on his 'Wife Project' to identify a woman to spend the rest of his life with, designing a huge questionnaire to establish compatability - 'Do you eat kidneys?' Correct answer: Sometimes - it's blatantly obvious what will happen next. A PhD student called Rosie walks into his office and immediately disrupts his careful life with her chaotic attitude. She fails the Wife Project questionnaire on every single question and the writing is on the wall. She will turn out to be troubled (in a rather limp sort of way); the plot will throw them together (Don undertakes to help her search for her biological father); their mutal attraction will be obvious to everyone except each other.

Having met, Don and Rosie move through the book more like actors in a romantic comedy than realised individuals on their own trajectories. You can't imagine a book about one or other in isolation. Simison originally wrote the story as a screenplay before adapting it into a novel, and it shows very clearly. You can visualise the scenes as they unfold: how they would be shot, how the set piece dialogues would be delivered. I could cast it right now. Carey Mulligan as Rosie, Hugh Jackman as Don, Cate Blanchett as Claudia, Colin Firth as Gene. I can even guess which bits would be in the trailer. I'd enjoy watching it on a Saturday night with a bottle of wine and a vat of popcorn. Since the book was optioned within about 25 seconds of publication (or probably even before) I'm sure I'll do just that.

Quite a bit has been said about The Rosie Project's depiction of Aspergers, and the positive portrayal of Don as a romantic lead. Personally I thought he was a pretty standard, stereotyped portrait of someone on the spectrum, and that the book did very little to expand my insight or understanding. I thought the 2009 film Adam gave a far more complex and nuanced view of what it is like to have a relationship with someone who views the world so differently.

Friday, January 24, 2014

You would be forgiven for thinking that I was currently sponsored by Granta. Quite coincidentally my first three reads of the year have been from them: Night Waking, then The Luminaries and now The Dig. You might remember that it was on my list of most-anticipated books of 2014, and my chosen new release for January. Fitting, because it's a January sort of book, the perfect match to the winter darkness and the icy turn of the year. Short, brutal, bloody and uncompromising; chilly and haunting and disconcertingly raw. All these things, and wonderful.

It alternately weaves two brief narrative threads together, one belonging to the nameless 'big man' and the other to Daniel, a sheep farmer in the Welsh valleys. It is lambing time and the valley is pin-pricked with lights in barns and sheds, as people sit all-night vigils over their flocks 'in isolated private intimacy'. As Daniel watches new lives arriving, the big man presides over the violent senseless deaths of the badgers which he catches for baiting. He uses the cover of darkness to get rid of the remains, posing them on country roads and then ramming over them with his van to conceal wounds caused by the dogs and restraints.

This is how the book begins, sickening and unflinching:

He kicked the badger round a little to unstiffen it. He kicked the head out so it lay exposed across the road. Its top lip was in a snarl and looked exaggerated and some of the teeth were smashed above the lower jaw, hanging loose where they had broken it with a spade to give the dogs a chance.

They hadn't had the ground to dig a pit so they had fastened the badger to a tree to let the lurchers at it and the hind leg was skinned and deeply wire-cut. That could be a problem, he thought. That could be a giveaway... He thought about tearing off the leg. Ag, I wouldn't get it, he thought. I wouldn't get that off.

Bitch, he said: then he ground his foot down on the leg, and stamped over and over, smashing the thin precise line of the wire out of the raw flesh.

The big man is a threat, an embodiment of violence and the excitement of violence; even the inanimate things around him 'feared him somehow'. The novel tenses around him like it is preparing itself for a beating. Reading his sections - as he gases rats, digs for badgers, hides guns under his bath - I took a mental step back, held the book a bit further away.

Daniel couldn't be more opposite. Violence is done to him rather than by him, although not directly. He has just lost his pregnant wife in a freak accident, her head kicked in by a panicked horse, and now he is desperately working his farm alone. The shifts in the lambing shed, previously shared, are merged into one long unending blur. He feels his dead wife all around him, present in the tokens of her left behind. Her boots and waterproofs sat next to his in the doorway; a hankerchief lost during the last harvest and found amongst the sheep feed; her smell in the bedroom. Being immersed in his grief - his 'massive devastation' - is as extreme and traumatic a reading experience as being subjected to the big man's brutality. The Dig ranges the full register of discomfort.

Cynan Jone's prose is mostly precise and uncompromising, occasionally growing biblical in its cadences. It's barely a couple of hours of reading, but I strung it out over the weekend because it demands attention word by word. You could pass over some startling writing if you rushed it:

Around the field crows were turning over the dung and taking up the worms. They made a strange black contrast to the fresh white lambs. Even in their adjutant walking they contrasted. He stood holding the barrow. The hedges were not yet beginning to green up. It was as if there was a holding back to them. The ewes cried ritually and the lambs bleated back and now and then came in from play and pushed roughly as their mothers, their tails frenzied as they drank, and here and there were lambs sleeping in their mothers' lee, folded up and cat-like.

Adjutant walking. The ritual cries of the ewes. The hedges holding back. You can see why Jones' has been called the Welsh Cormac McCarthy. He writes about the meeting of the natural world and the world of men as a mystical confluence of malevolence and great beauty.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the novels' extraordinary setpiece. It squats in the middle of the book - the section was previously published as a short story in Granta magazine and shortlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award in 2013 - and stands almost alone. It describes the long sweaty process of catching a badger in its sett, using small fierce terriers to corner it inside and then laboriously digging it out from above. The big man recruits another nameless man and his teenage son to help him catch a huge boar, whom he intends to sell to baiters for a few hundred pounds. Told primarily from the teenage boy's point of view it unpicks a destructive culture of masculinity, and the ways in which young men are socialised in violence and conflict. Ultimately the boy is excited to spend a day with his distant and probably abusive father, feeling wanted and like a man. This need for approval leads him to a complicity in the violence against the badger. He associates the satisfaction he feels at the attention, and the big man's compliments on his vicious little ratting dog with the brutality of the thing they are doing.

What the boy cannot see, does not yet know, is that behind the brutality and the physical bravado, is fear. The big man is crushed by fear. His life is one of narrow choices. He cannot be other than what he is, whether because he has been made or born that way. He lives in a sort of hiding, a loner on his piece of land at the mercy of the police, or skulking about in the darkness of the valley. He has recently served a jail term for an unlicensed firearm, and is nervy about being found with either a gun or a live badger. He doesn't want to go back to a cell; he doesn't want to be trapped. The parallel between what he fears for himself and what he does to the badgers is very clear: at an unconscious level he understands what they feel, when they are put in a pit and the dogs are set on them. He understands it and is filled with contempt and bitterness towards them; the violence he commits against them is like killing that part of himself which he most detests. It is an excoricating portrait of vulnerability.

And the land itself broods and grieves. Daniel becomes obsessed with the idea that his tragedy began when ditching work removed a metal shard from one of his fields. It has been there as long as anyone remembers, and has acquired the presence of a shrine or a totem. Removing it disturbs the order of things, releases some malicious influence with the big man as its emissary.

Cynan Jones' won a Betty Trask Award for his first novel, The Long Dry, and has written an installment in Seren's New Stories of the Mabinogion. I'm really eager to read both of these now, and his second novel Everything I Found on the Beach too. The Dig is already a contender for my best of 2014. Buy it. Read it.

Monday, January 13, 2014

For a variety of reasons, I'm in something of a reading and reviewing slump right now; until I regain my joy, I'll be reposting old reviews from elsewhere.

The following review - a joint piece on Throne of the CrescentMoon (2012) by Saladin Ahmed, and Alif the Unseen (2012) by G Willow Wilson - was written last summer, and recently published in Vector #274. The table of contents for the issue's reviews, and Martin Petto's editorial, are both here.

I suspect you can guess what this review’s opening gambit is going to be, but – alas – I can’t resist: you wait ages for a Middle Eastern-tinged fantasy novel, and then two come along at once. While the genre’s invented worlds and visions of the future have become a little less Anglo- and Euro-centric over the past few years, engagement with the storytelling potential of any of the cultures of the Islamic world has remained vanishingly rare, at least outside of the wackier end of American military sf (of which the less said, the better). Within more thoughtful mainstream sf, Ian McDonald and Kameron Hurley have shown what can be done, drawing excellent stories out of richly textured portraits of multifaceted Islam(s) and diverse Muslim characters, and one or two Arabic-language works have appeared in English translation (like Ahmed Khaled Towfik's Utopia (2011), set in near-future Egypt); until now, though, there has been little fantasy on offer.

I use ‘fantasy’ quite deliberately, here; both of the debut novels under review, one by an Arab-American and one by an American convert to Islam resident in Cairo, are fantasies. Throne of the Crescent Moon is a slice of high adventure swords-and-sorcery, in an urban setting reminiscent of medieval Baghdad or Cairo. Alif the Unseen, for all that it centres on a computer hacker in a contemporary (fictional) Gulf city and was touted in some quarters as a contender for this year’s Arthur C Clarke Award shortlist, is in reality about as science fictional in aims and spirit as Harry Potter. Its nameless City is a realm in which jinn regularly meddle, and Wilson doesn’t even bother to supply some handwavium code to explain the Macguffin computer programme that her protagonist creates in what is effectively a magical trance. The science, such as it is, isn't the point, only window-dressing for Wilson's real interests.

Of the two books, Throne is the more successful, both as a piece of entertainment and as a blending of familiar genre tropes with Islamic cultural touchstones. At the core of the story is a plucky band of adventurers – ghul-hunter Adoulla, reserved young dervish warrior Raseed, shapeshifting tribeswoman Zamia, healer Dawoud, and his magician wife Litaz – on a quest to save the venerable city of Dhamsawaat (and its ruler, the Khalif) from scheming courtiers conjuring evil spirits. Ahmed’s choice to set the majority of the action in city streets and souqs is a smart one: medieval Islamic culture was overwhelmingly urban, and Dhamsawaat is a nicely realised confection of commerce and tea-houses, book-lined homes and dusty alleyways. Similarly, the situations our heroes find themselves in echo Arabic and Persian literary tropes from the likes of TheThousand and One Nights: slightly undignified scuffles in alleyways with glamorous thieves and sniffy religious scholars, drawn-out negotiations with obstinate functionaries at palace gates, and encounters with age-old supernatural beings on the liminal fringe between desert and city walls.

There are some oddities in the use of the material, chiefly among the names. Adoulla, for example, means “the state”, and – at least in a medieval context – makes no sense as a name standing alone, rather than (as was the usual practice) paired with an attribute of said state, such as in the name of a certain 11th-century vizier, known as Nizam al-Mulk (‘pillar of the state’). Sillier still, we’re told several times of the existence of a poet called Ismi Shihab. Since ‘Ismi’ literally means ‘my name’ in Arabic – and ‘Ismi Shihab’ simply ‘my name is Shihab’ - I couldn't help but giggle every time I read it, imagining how the poor chap must have spent his life trying and failing to make himself understood: “Hello, my name is Shihab.” “Nice to meet you, Mr My Name.” “No, no, my name is Shihab!” (etc.) [*]

Where Throne wears its setting lightly, Alif the Unseen feels more like it has something to prove. There are several dialogue exchanges – on medieval Islamic science, for example – that seem to be directly addressed to a western audience presumed ignorant of Islam, and there is also some real effort to nuance the issue of women, the veil, and choice (although the latter is undermined by the way the narrative treats its female characters, on which more below). Willow's nameless City, meanwhile, is a sensitive and in places justifiably angry portrait of the autocratic regimes and highly stratified societies that still largely dominate the post-colonial Arabic-speaking world, particularly the oil-rich Gulf monarchies. The City is divided into elite and underclass, with the latter being largely South Asian immigrants labouring for minimal wages and with few legal rights; it is marked by secret prisons and police brutality, by surveillance and online censorship (something its protagonist, the eponymous Alif, makes an illicit living helping clients to circumvent, whether for political purposes or porn). The regime's representatives, when we meet them, are unfortunately more cartoonish than truly sinister or plausible, but a spell in prison for Alif makes for a harrowing middle passage to the book, lent resonance by on-going reports of such repression in Wilson's new home of Egypt and elsewhere.

Like Throne, Alif merges familiar genre beats with fantastical elements drawn from Islamic literature and myth. In the role of smart-aleck supernatural interlocutors for her human characters, Wilson casts the jinn, whose capricious antics feature in many works of medieval Islamic fiction and fact. Shapeshifting, sort-of immortal magic-users, the jinn get to be rude and violent and active agents in the story where Alif and friends are mostly drawn along by events, and they also provide access to cultural memory (which I suppose is a nice way of saying 'infodump'), telling Alif fun facts about the heritage he shares with everyone else in the City. The jinn's homeland, a magical city that exists in effectively a parallel realm, accessed through secret doorways, is Iram of the Columns, mainstay of southern Arabian folklore. The story's main magical artefact, meanwhile, is – fittingly for a culture as steeped in love of the written word as Islam – a book. Named The Thousand and One Days, it is a collection of tales-within-tales like The Thousand and One Nights, to which it is supposedly a jinn-authored counterpart; decoded correctly, it may offer the ability to manipulate space and time. These elements don't always cohere as well they might with the hacker-versus-the-system framework of the plot, however, especially compared with Ahmed's simpler world- and story-building; Wilson has to do more (and more visible) heavy-lifting to get the pieces of her puzzle into place.

Throne is fun but lightweight, a self-contained tale that gets wrapped up in under 300 pages whose consequences are little more than a ripple on the surface of on-going Dhamsawaat life, and whose characters make for cheerful company but are unlikely to live long in the memory. The fight scenes have an air of turn-based combat about them, but are written with enough gusto and attention to in-character experience that it doesn't much matter. The deficiencies in the characters are more serious, but fit with Ahmed’s breezy approach to the novel as a whole: Raseed and Zamia are drawn in broad strokes, for example, the former being an earnest, pious youth determined to deny any feelings that distract from his calling, the latter a prickly, grieving desert nomad out of sorts in the city and laser-focused on avenging the death of her entire clan. Could there be romance on the cards by the novel’s end? (Yes, indeed, but it's all too thinly-sketched and unearned to have much impact.) The older characters get to be more nuanced and enjoyable, perhaps because they aren’t obliged to bear the weight of such conventional story arcs. Adoulla makes for an engaging lead, an essentially good-natured too-old-for-this-shit veteran of supernatural combat, with a love of tea, a “blessedly unstainable” kaftan, and the inevitable loyal love interest whom his dedication to his career kept him from marrying. Litaz and Dawood, likewise, work nicely as a sweetly caring and sharp-witted old couple with hints of a more dynamic past.

Alif the Unseen, by contrast, has a pretty uncompelling protagonist, to put it mildly; Alif is an arrogant manchild who throws elaborate tantrums when things don't go his way. The problem is not that the novel is unaware of how repulsive his actions are, but rather that it actively seeks to excuse and justify said actions. When his girlfriend breaks off her covert relationship with him, because her family has made an arranged marriage for her, does he react with quiet heartbreak for her plight or impotent rage directed at said family, perhaps lamenting the patriarchal society that obliges a girl to obey her elders in all things? No, of course not. Instead, he blames her for refusing to elope with him into an uncertain, family-less future, then digs in a cupboard until he finds the stained sheet from the first time they slept together, and sends it to her with a note suggesting she is likely to need this proof of her virginity for her wedding night. Next, in response to her not-unreasonable suggestion that it would be easier if she never saw him again, he creates a magic computer programme in order to passive-aggressively fulfil her request. Using the surreptitious 'back-door' access he long ago gave himself to her computer system (because apparently nothing says I'm A Keeper like spying on your girlfriend), the programme will log her keystrokes and chart her online activity in such a way that it will be able build a profile of her and use it to automatically detect her presence, whatever alias she uses online. Through the programme, he will always know where she is, while she won't know where he is because he'll be able to prevent her from seeing him.

Yes, Wilson's hero spends the first part of her novel creating the world’s first 100% successful lifelong stalk-your-ex app. But Wilson does not stop there; so invested is she in justifying Alif’s sense of petulant entitlement that the novel is structured to reward his behaviour. His magic stalking programme turns out to be the only thing that can save the City from the forces of secular and supernatural evil that are combining to oppress and overthrow it. (It essentially sparks the Arab Spring.) Then, to cap it all, the unfortunate ex-girlfriend shows up right at the end, whereupon Willow gives her a couple of pages of dialogue to demonstrate definitively that she was a shallow, status-obsessed bitch all along and Alif is definitely better off without her. Luckily, the plucky, veiled Girl Next Door, Dina, is just itching to stop rom-com bickering with him and swoon at his feet. Dina is a well-drawn character, a forthright young woman who is about ten times braver and smarter than Alif, and whose wearing of the veil is presented as a considered choice expressive of her independence of her parents (who had hoped she'd stay unveiled long enough to be sold off to some rich Arab as a plaything or minor wife). Unfortunately, Dina's main role in the plot is to a) alternately moon over Alif and (fondly) tell him off, b) disappear for large chunks of the page-count, and c) get threatened with rape roughly once every fifty pages when she is around.

Strangest of all Alif the Unseen's characters is Wilson's apparent self-insert, an American named only 'the convert'. She is a superficially informed but in fact hopelessly naïve voice, whom the narrative mocks at regular intervals; she's a graduate student working on medieval manuscripts who is repeatedly shown to have too 'western' (read: rational, scholarly) an approach to the world. (Although, since one example of her over-rational Western blindness to wonder involves a bizarre refusal to believe that such a thing exists as a fourteenth-century manuscript written on paper – when plenty of major western university libraries contain older Arabic paper books – you have to wonder how many western scholars Wilson has actually met.) Indeed, the convert seems to exist in the novel primarily to be insulted and humiliated, and is presented as truly content only when she's living in supernatural purdah in Iram, carrying the baby of the jinni who had been most ardently dedicated to demeaning her.

Neither of these debut novels is an entirely satisfactory exploration of the possibilities of Islamic (or Arabic) genre fantasy. Wilson's fantastical Arab Spring, examining the tensions and injustices of modern Gulf society through the re-emergence of Islamic myth and magic, is a marvellous idea let down by her determination to use her characters as vehicles for her argument, and her apparent unwillingness to just let her protagonist be the immature idiot his actions would tend to suggest, rather than the saviour she would like him to be. Ahmed's work is less self-conscious about itself as a pioneer of swords-and-Muslim-sorcery, but perhaps as a consequence it also feels less thoughtful, and less important, for all that it's a fun experience. Both are interesting, then, but it's likely their authors will produce more challenging and absorbing books in the future.

~~Nic

* But the bit that took the prize? The typesetting of map caption at the start of Throne of the Crescent Moon. (I'm assuming Ahmed isn't responsible for typesetting choices. Hoping.) It's the most bizarre confection of actual Arabic letters, vaguely Arabicy swirls, and the inevitable dots that artists unfamiliar with Arabic seem to feel compelled to sprinkle all over the place. After all, it's not like those dots are an integral part of certain letters, like the dot on top of an 'i', or anything; it's just like calligraphic decoration, isn't it? I sigh a thousand times at you.

Saturday, January 11, 2014

Sarah Moss' second novel, Night Waking, just edged its way onto my 'best of 2013' list. I roared through it over Christmas like a guilty pleasure. I was feeling very well-inclined towards the world in general and it was the beneficiary. So goes the subjective project of reading I suppose; at another time of year it might not have fared so well, because I can see on reflection Night Waking is difficult in its brilliance. It's a novel of fascinating ideas and entertainments and dark humour - and highly recommended - but also slightly repetitious and flawed.

Dr Anna Bennett is an Oxford research fellow cast off on the deserted Hebridean island of Colsay with her two children - seven year old Raphael and two year old Moth - and her husband Giles Cunningham. Giles, who manages to be an absentee father despite being the only other adult within 20 miles, is an ornithologist and also the island's owner. Colsay has been in his family for generations, since the 1840s, when the Cunninghams were absentee landlords over a handful of crofters. The last tenants left in the 1960s, leaving the picturesque ruins to the puffins. Now even the puffins are leaving and their decline is the subject of Giles' academic work. Anna is keeping him company while he collects data during the summer months and they renovate one of the abandoned blackhouses as a luxury holiday rental cottage. She is also trying and failing to write up her research on childhood in the 18th century.

Failing mostly because of the responsibilities of unsupported motherhood and the effects of two years of chronic sleep deprivation (as well as the usual self-sabotage of procrastination). Moth, who has never slept through the night, and Raph, who is in constant fear of the apocalypse, leave her with very little time to herself. The time she does snatch is overshadowed by feelings of shame and anger: that she is a neglectful mother on the one hand, and that her children have robbed of her career on the other. We meet Anna on a knife edge of desperation, consumed by regret, apparently powerless to change direction.

She loves her children desperately, and is fiercely protective, and fearful of their harm. She reads and rereads manuals on childcare best practise for feeding, exercising, educating. Her children are raised on organic snacks; she makes all their own bread; Raphael feeds his sense of impending doom by reading the Guardian especially shipped from Glasgow. Anna is the very picture of a middle class liberal parent but is constantly falling short. She keeps a stash of cheap biscuits in the cupboard for toddler bribery, and never gets round to the educational 'craft activities' she reads about. Her native intelligence makes her resentful of ridiculous standards, but her aspirations won't let her rest. Her aspirations, her sense of personal inadequacy and also her guilt. At the base of her guilt is her secret wish that she had never had children at all:

Would I do it again, understanding as I do now and didn't then, that failure at motherhood is for life and beyond, that everything that happens to my children and my children's children is my fault? That my meanness and bad temper are going to trickle into the future like nuclear waste into the Irish Sea? No. Not because I don't love my children - everyone loves their children, child abusers love their children - but because I don't like motherhood and you don't find that out till it's too late. Love is not enough when it comes to children. Bad luck.

And beneath the guilt, buried very deep, is the fear. The fear that she might be capable of harming her children for a moment's peace. Moss seeds the book with intimation of child harm. Anna tells us that Raphael 'bruises easily' and Giles catches her pressing Moth violently into his mattress when he won't go down to sleep. When Raph digs up a skeleton of a newborn baby in the garden of their house, Anna's first thought is of infanticide, of cut throats and smotherings. The remains are historical, but not ancient. She distracts herself from her own work with research on infant mortality in the Hebrides and Colsay's history, and spends time reading transcripts of infanticide trials. She is repulsed and compelled by the baby's short life and unusual garden burial.

In a way Night Waking is a dark night of the soul sort of narrative, but it is also consistently funny. The humour comes oftenest out of Anna's power struggles with her children. Like all adults she knows how futile and demeaning it is to pit her wits against a two year old, yet she just can't help doing it. She is rye about her defeats, and subsequent gestures of defiance:

I've stopped showering in the morning because Raph allows me three minutes and stands on the bathmat with a stopwatch telling me how many millimetres of the polar ice cap have been melted by the energy to heat the water and Moth, who still has vivid memories of what breasts are for, peers around the curtain, getting his clothes wet and gesturing unmistakeably. So I run a bath, hot enough and deep enough to drown polar bears.

She takes some satisfaction in a spot of creative reinterpretation as she reads Moth's favourite children's book, The Tiger Who Came for Tea: "Good morning," said the Tiger. 'I'm here to symbolise the danger and excitement that is missing from your life of mindless domesticity,'

Interwoven with Anna' story is another story, in a relatively minor key, constructed from letters written by May Moberley, a well-to-do midwife sent to Colsay in the 1880s by Giles' ancestors. At the time the infant mortality rate on the island was 100%, and May doggedly reports her thwarted attempts to show the women the error of their ways. Her inbred sense of righteousness and entitlement, and moral responsibility to the 'ignorant native', is a text book colonial mentality. It is mirrored in Anna and Giles' own assumptions about the locals who live on the neighbouring island - there probably isn't a cafetiere north of Fort William! they joke - and about the comparatively superior tastes of the cosmopolitan visitors to their blackhouse. While Anna has quite a bee in her bonnet about her relatively humble beginnings, and about the perceived snobbery of the Fellows at her College (and her husband's family), she is herself entirely in their world and blind to the privilege. Visiting the neighbouring island she is surprised to discover they already know who she is and appear to resent her presence; she doesn't recognise herself as interloping Lady of the Manor.

Night Waking is an unpicking of Anna's way of seeing and thinking about the world. A lot of her mental process is consumed with children, some of it with her less than satisfactory marriage and her failing career and Colsay's past, a much smaller part with her work. But whatever she casts her eye on is refracted through an academic lens. When Anna comes across May's story during her Colsay research, she interprets it using discourses of postcolonialism not personal sympathies. I tended to think May was done a disservice in the book - she was so incidental, her character barely developed and I wanted to know more about her. Now though I think Moss' point is not about May at all but about how she is interpreted; how she is read. May is not so much a character as source material.

Anna is constantly in the process of interpreting, of reading in the academic sense, and prefers a world of signs, dialogues and fragmentary evidence to the mess and muck of her reality. This is why she is so utterly consumed by the not particularly mysterious skeleton in her back garden, but not in the slightest by the odd way she is treated by the investigating police officer. The skeleton is a tantalising fragment that her mind can act upon, exactly what she needs history to be - she does not want the full story or the lived experience. She sees the contemporary world, with its glut of information, as the end of history:

History is a retrospective that needs to be partial and fragmentary if we are to make sense of it. There is no story in the muddle and pain of real life, rolling from century to century in births, couplings and death distinguished only by settings and costumes in which we enact them, only a twisted familiarity. I tried and failed to imagine the mess that would result if every Pict had tweeted an account of roman occupation, every Roman his or her own personal narrative of the decline and fall, every Saxon peasant a full and frank account of conversion to Christianity, every Viking farmer the detail of the theft of every Saxon cow. If every human presence on the planet left a story.'

And so Night Waking emerges as a book strangely devoid of sympathy or pity (except self-pity), despite the horror of wars and natural disasters that Raph is constantly in fear of. Tellingly it is only 7 year old Raph who seems to understand that the skeleton in the garden was an actual dead baby, someone's loved one, a source of grief. When Anna explains that it died a long time ago, and that infant mortality was common then, he remains defiant: just because it was a long time ago, doesn't mean it's ok. Anna finds this infuriating, because she can only see the baby as an object of study. It is only one amongst many stories that she doesn't see. Reading her first person narration it's easy to miss the fact that Gile's has just lost his father, and that another motive for them coming to Colsay was for him to grieve and remember. Coming upon a box of the dead man's belongings in his study Anna is surprised that Giles must have brought them with him. In the end she is quite an unsympathetic, closed off figure.

There is so much here, in a book that skims as a drama of parenthood with a weak mystery subplot. It isn't perfect. I wasn't a fan of the late arrival of the holiday cottage guests with their anorexic daughter for example, and Anna's domestic drudgery did become repetitive. But it is full of thinking about the way we interpret (and misinterpret) the past and the people and events around us, and is so canny and understated in how it draws this out. I'm very much looking forward to Moss' next book, Bodies of Light. It is a sort of companion book, following May's sister (the recipient of some of the letters written in this book) who is training to be one of the first women doctors.

Saturday, January 04, 2014

2014 has started off well for me, with a trip to Hadrian's Wall in Northumbria. Esther and I were there for 5 days and spent them mooching around the local countryside, visiting Vindolanda and Housesteads Roman forts, taking long windy walks along the wall itself and pootling to Hexham. All made possible because of our trusty car, and the fact that we can both now drive it. Two years ago neither of us could, and holidays to the wilds of the countryside in winter were an impossibility. Even if you could get to your accommodation - difficult - there was no chance of getting around on minimal winter bus timetables. We also took advantage of our limitless luggage allowance and spent most of our Christmas money in Cogito Books in Hexham, which is well worth a visit if you are in the area. I picked up copies of Longbourn by Jo Baker, Beware of Pity by Stefan Zweig, The Dig by Cynan Jones and Butterflies in November by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir.

Now we are back to York and the real world, and my thoughts have turned back to the year ahead and my resolutions. I have one, in three parts, about reading and blogging and its extremely simple.

Take a more active part in the bookish world.

I have been thinking about this quite a lot. Over the last two years or so I have dropped away from book blogging, from keeping up with new releases and prizes and from chatting about my reading more generally. I desperately want to rectify that in 2014. I have two strategies for this.

Average at least one blog post a week, and make them book reviews where I can. That should make 52 posts in the year - of which this is the first - and more than I have blogged in quite some time. I'm telling myself that quality and length doesn't matter; I'm just aiming for some coherent book thoughts and the rest depends on my inclination that week. A 3000 word epic or a 100 word mini post. Just something.

Read and comment more widely in the blogosphere. This is really important, because the whole point of blogging for me is the conversation and the community. I'm going to be discovering as many new book blogs as I can.

Stay current. I've read a lot of posts by bloggers who want to get away from the 'new books' rat race, and I've felt that way myself, but I've gone too far the other way. I read hardly any new releases in 2013 and missed the excitement and anticipation of them. So at the time of year when lots of bloggers are resolutely staring down their TBR I'm eagerly flicking through publisher's catalogues and planning what to buy, borrow and read. I've chosen at least one new book each month to read. Below is my list at the moment; consider these my most hotly anticipated reads of 2014 (so far).

January

The Dig by Cynan Jones (Granta)

This short novels is literally plastered in blurbs from writers who admired it, and John Self has just posted his review of it here. It sounds like a brutal, bleak and cruel book, short and remorseless.

Built of the interlocking fates of a badger-baiter and a farmer struggling through lambing season, the story unfolds in a stark rural setting where man, animal, and land are at loggerheads. Jones writes of isolation and loss with resonant carefulness, and about the simple rawness of animal existence with an unblinking eye. There is no bucolic pastoral here. This is pure, pared-down rural realism, crackling with compressed energy, from a writer of uncommon gifts.

Also on my most anticipated list this month is The Night Guest by Fiona McFarlane (Sceptre), about a woman who might actually be a tiger (!) and The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara (Atlantic), about a 1950s doctor who finds the secret to long life on a Micronesian Island.

I *still* haven't read any Oyeyemi despite having every single one of her books on my TBR. Her new book is about the friendship between three unlikely women - Boy, Snow and Bird - and sounds intriguing. I'm looking to get a group discussion of this one going with some other Oyeyemi newbies as well as confirmed fans. If you'd like to take part, please do!

BOY Novak turns twenty and decides to try for a brand-new life. Flax Hill, Massachusetts, isn’t exactly a welcoming town, but it does have the virtue of being the last stop on the bus route she took from New York. Flax Hill is also the hometown of Arturo Whitman – craftsman, widower, and father of Snow.

SNOW is mild-mannered, radiant and deeply cherished – exactly the sort of little girl Boy never was, and Boy is utterly beguiled by her. If Snow displays a certain inscrutability at times, that’s simply a characteristic she shares with her father, harmless until Boy gives birth to Snow’s sister, Bird.

When BIRD is born Boy is forced to re-evaluate the image Arturo’s family have presented to her, and Boy, Snow and Bird are broken apart.

Sparkling with wit and vibrancy, Boy, Snow, Bird is a deeply moving novel about three women and the strange connection between them.

- See more at: http://www.picador.com/books/boy,-snow,-bird#sthash.ZfscLAL7.dpuf

BOY Novak turns twenty and decides to try for a brand-new life. Flax Hill, Massachusetts, isn’t exactly a welcoming town, but it does have the virtue of being the last stop on the bus route she took from New York. Flax Hill is also the hometown of Arturo Whitman – craftsman, widower, and father of Snow.

SNOW is mild-mannered, radiant and deeply cherished – exactly the sort of little girl Boy never was, and Boy is utterly beguiled by her. If Snow displays a certain inscrutability at times, that’s simply a characteristic she shares with her father, harmless until Boy gives birth to Snow’s sister, Bird.

When BIRD is born Boy is forced to re-evaluate the image Arturo’s family have presented to her, and Boy, Snow and Bird are broken apart.

Sparkling with wit and vibrancy, Boy, Snow, Bird is a deeply moving novel about three women and the strange connection between them.

- See more at: http://www.picador.com/books/boy,-snow,-bird#sthash.ZfscLAL7.dpuf

BOY Novak turns twenty and decides to try for a brand-new life. Flax Hill, Massachusetts, isn’t exactly a welcoming town, but it does have the virtue of being the last stop on the bus route she took from New York. Flax Hill is also the hometown of Arturo Whitman – craftsman, widower, and father of Snow.

SNOW is mild-mannered, radiant and deeply cherished – exactly the sort of little girl Boy never was, and Boy is utterly beguiled by her. If Snow displays a certain inscrutability at times, that’s simply a characteristic she shares with her father, harmless until Boy gives birth to Snow’s sister, Bird.

When BIRD is born Boy is forced to re-evaluate the image Arturo’s family have presented to her, and Boy, Snow and Bird are broken apart.

Sparkling with wit and vibrancy, Boy, Snow, Bird is a deeply moving novel about three women and the strange connection between them.

- See more at: http://www.picador.com/books/boy,-snow,-bird#sthash.ZfscLAL7.dpuf

March

The Hunting School by Sarah Hall (Faber)

I'm actually not sure if this book is coming out this month. Amazon has it as March 2014; Book Depository as February 2015, and Faber doesn't have it all. Since they are the publisher and should know best I guess it hasn't been scheduled yet. But I'm putting it on here just in case, because a new book by Sarah Hall is a thing to be eagerly awaited.

Also catching my eye, and definitely out in March is Northanger Abbey by Val McDermid (The Borough Press), the crime writer's contribution to the Austen Project, and The Dynamite Room by Jason Hewitt (Simon & Schuster). I have a proof of this (kindly sent by the publisher) and the blurb has hooked me in. A young girl walks through a deserted Suffolk village in July 1940 to find that her family and all her neighbours have disappeared. Late at night a German soldier comes and takes her hostage in her own home, heralding a full blown invasion. He knows her name, promises not to hurt her, and is somehow familiar...

April

Bodies of Light by Sarah Moss (Granta)

Last year I read two books by Sarah Moss, including Night Waking a sort-of compaion to this book. It is the first of two, and is full blown historical fiction. Right up my street I think, and a beautiful cover.

Ally (older sister of May in Night Waking), is intelligent, studious and engaged in an eternal - and losing - battle to gain her mother's approval and affection. Her mother, Elizabeth, is a religious zealot, keener on feeding the poor and saving prostitutes than on embracing the challenges of motherhood. Even when Ally wins a scholarship and is accepted as one of the first female students to read medicine in London, it still doesn't seem good enough.

This was a hard month to choose for. I'm also tooking forward to Look Who's Back by Timur Vermes (Maclehose Press) about Hitler making a comeback on YouTube and The Quick by Lauren Owens (Jonathan Cape), which seems to be a rompy Victorian pastiche with twins.

May

Gwendolen by Diana Souhami (Quercus)

I read George Eliot's Daniel Deronda a couple of years ago, and the character who has stayed with me - far better than Daniel himself or his sappy love interest - is Gwendolen Harleth. This book picks up her life 30 years on, as she writes her confessional.

Gambling at the roulette tables of the Kursaal, Gwendolen Harleth glances up to meet Daniel Deronda’s arresting stare. Striking, selfish and wilful, she is at that moment the mistress of her destiny. Thirty years on, the flawed heroine and true protagonist of Eliot’s last great novel writes her confessional to the man whose ever-imagined gaze has prevailed throughout her life. The egotism, naiveté and sensitivity of her blazing youth is evoked with bittersweet wisdom; a passionate remembrance of the events leading up to the marriage that broke her spirit, and the loss of the man who broke her heart.

June

I actually don't have a book for June yet, so I'll pick another May Book, Cuckoo Song by Frances Hardinge (Pan Macmillan Childrens). I'm really looking forward to reading more of her in 2014, after her A Face Like Glass made my top 13 of 2013.

When Triss wakes up after an accident, she knows that something is very wrong. She is insatiably hungry; her sister seems scared of her and her parents whisper behind closed doors. She looks through her diary to try to remember, but the pages have been ripped out.

Soon Triss discovers that what happened to her is more strange and terrible than she could ever have imagined, and that she is quite literally not herself. In a quest find the truth she must travel into the terrifying Underbelly of the city to meet a twisted architect who has dark designs on her family - before it's too late . . .

The second half of 2014 already looks set to be rich in new releases, with The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters (Virago), Lila by Marilynne Robinson (Virago), The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber (Canongate) and a new, as yet untitled book by Ali Smith due between September and November.

Saturday, December 28, 2013

I haven't written a blog post in a good long while, and have left Nic flying solo at Alexandria for the better part of a year. I have still been around now and then, lurking, reading my favourite blogs and very occasionally commenting. 2013 had been an eventful year for me, but not a reading year. In 2011 I read over 80 books; this year (so far) I have read 32. I've blogged a lot less than that - a handful of times. But I turned 30; I started a PhD; I lost 70lbs; I got a big promotion at work; I passed my driving test; I fulfilled all of my 2013 New Year resolutions. Except the ones about reading and blogging more, obviously.

I realise that something had to give during this crazy year of work and work and more work, and that thing was reading and writing about reading. I didn't have a slump as such or lose faith with it; I was burnt out and just set it aside. Now I'm working part time - two days a week - and studying part time, and I can already feel the juices flowing back into the parched areas of my brain. I'm almost ready to pick the reins back up again, and take the dust sheets off my book shelves, flex my review writing fingers.

I have missed the new releases and the buzz of excitement around prizes, and the warmth of the blogosphere and its many recommendations and passions; even the looming guilt of my towering TBR. Thank goodness I haven't really bought many books this year either, or it would be even vaster than before. I'm going to make only reading and blogging resolutions this year, and I'm going to work as hard at fulfilling those as I did at losing weight and all the rest.

All that is for later though, when the New Year is here. Now I want to tell you about my books of 2013, because although I haven't read a great deal I have read some wonderful worthwhile books that I should have told you about.

1. The Charioteer by Mary Renault

(Longman, 1952; Virago, reprinted 2013)

A book of epic proportions on a small canvas, and I think my overall favourite of the year. It is the first of Renault's back catalogue to be reprinted by Virago (more in April 2014, squee, and her entire ouevre by end of 2015) and is entirely unlike what I was expecting. I have several of her novels on my TBR, including the Alexander trilogy, and had her pegged as one of those superior mid-20th century historical fiction writers like Dorothy Dunnett and Patrick O'Brien. From the title I expected that this would be in the same category, but then I read an article in the Observer that dashed all my assumptions.

It isn't about the Classical world at all, but a pioneering novel of gay love in 1940s Britain. It's the story of Laurie Odell - a young man recuperating in military hospital after his knee has been irreparably damaged in the retreat to Dunkirk - and the men he loves. Laurie is different and he knows it. Though he occasionally flirts with the idea of kissing a woman, marrying a woman, his mind and body always turn back to men. Before the war, at Oxford, he was part of a 'set' that introduced him to a 'scene' of sorts, and before that, at school, he experienced a brief intense moment with head boy Ralph Lanyon, who was later expelled for a nameless crime. At the hospital he meets ward orderly Andrew Raynes, a Quaker and conscientious objector, and the two fall sweetly into a unspoken love. Later Laurie is also reunited with Ralph, also wounded at Dunkirk and the pair fall back into their schoolboy relationship.

The Charioteer is wonderful in all sorts of ways. It's tender and romantic; and swiftly and obliquely written; and incredibly straightforward about the homosexuality of its characters. Renault carefully unpicks underground gay culture in the war years - the fearful hiding but also the freedom of the blackout and of contact between so many men thrown together in the forces - and the fraught identities and masculinities of its members. Laurie is caught between a pure Platonic love with Andrew and the possibility of a more open, passionate life with Ralph. The book takes its title from an analogy in Plato's Phaedrus, of a charioteer with two horses, one white and one black, one clean and pure and always on the right path, the other fierce and headstrong and forever pulling towards something darker. This power struggle is everywhere in the book, in Laurie's choice of lovers, between hetero- and homosexual desire, between war and pacifism.

It's strange to think that so honest (and frankly polemical) a book was released in Britain only 15 years after The Well of Loneliness was censored and 14 years before sex between men was legalised. I highly recommend it.

A book that has stayed with me all year, and which I actually wrote about here (Victoria in blog writing shock!). Since then, of course, the book has won the Not-the-Booker Prize , been shortlisted for the Orange Prize (it will always be that to me, no matter how much Baileys I'm plyed with) and Costa Awards, and appeared on any number best-of lists. I'm sure you've all heard about it a million times. Here is a quick synoptical excerpt from my original review:

If you could relive your life, if you had the chance to do it all again and change things for the better or worse, would you?

Ursula Beresford Todd has no choice in the matter. She is born, and born, and born again on the 11th February 1910, and each time the thread of her life spools out slightly differently. The first time we meet her for only the briefest moment before she dies, the umbilical cord choking off her first breath.

The second time she survives through the intervention of a doctor; another time because her mother snips the cord with a suspicious prescience. This is the first hinge of many in her life, when events might shift and send a shiver of change through the story.

Sometimes Ursula lives to be an elderly spinster, other times 'the black bat' comes for her and she dies of childhood flu, or under a collapsing wall in Blitz-torn London, or even during one memorable twist by biting down on a cyanide capsule.

You probably know that the book begins with Ursula attempting an assasination of Hitler, and maybe that put you off, but don't let it. That is just one avenue on the complex map of Ursula's life, and not the most important one by far. My only regret was that I read it on Kindle - courtesy of Netgalley - rather than in hardback because the structure of the book demands flicking back and forth, being able to reread sections and revisit parts of Ursula's many and various incarnations.

Another book that I wrote about, and the first of two YA novels on my best-of list. Reading it restored my faith in reading after a dismal 2012. (It turns out that I blogged quite a bit at the beginning of the year, and a lot of my favourite books are from those early months. Does the writing make them seem better, or did I write because they were better? Interesting question.)

Seraphina is just sixteen years old, an unimaginable creature born of a human man and a dragon. Yes, a dragon, a dragon that has taken human form and fallen in love with a lawyer of all people, in contravention of every law of the land of Goredd and of the peace treaty between human and dragon kind. When Seraphina is a little girl scales appear on her body: a girdle of silver around her waist and around her left arm. No one must ever know, see or - Saints forbid - touch this monstrous part of her. Her true ancestry is revealed to her. Linn, her dragon mother, died in childbirth but left her with a parcel of memories which now burst upon her as powerful visions and a menagerie of imaginary grotesques that she has to manage through meditation and self-control. Her gift for music - something Linn also passed to her - is what saves her life, gives her meaning and at the beginning of the novel takes her right into the heart of Goredd's civic life, as assistant to court composer Viridius and music tutor to the young princess Glisselda.

It was on lots of blogging best-of lists last year -which is why I bought and read it in January, thank you all - so I'm a year late, but I'm sure there are more people out there to convert to it. Just imagine: Half-dragons, and dragons that look like humans, and dragons that look like dragons. Lots of dragons basically, and lots of fun and thoughfulness. Where is book 2 Rachel Hartman? I need it now!

4. The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt

(Granta, 2011)

I didn't write about this (boo) but lots of other bloggers and podcasters have done and I'm years late so you have probably all read it anyway. Or dismissed it because it was on the Booker Prize shortlist in the year of the 'readability' brouhaha. I'm here to exhort you to think again. The book follows Eli Sisters and his older brother Charlie as they shoot and whore their way from Chicago to Sacramento on the trail of an inventor, Hermann Kermit Warm, whom they have been paid to kill. Along the way they encounter prospectors and no-hopers, thieves and desperate children, and Eli begins to question his vocation as a gun for hire while his brother drinks himself into a bloody stupor. Can you be tenderly violent? Well this book is that, and also poignantly immoral. And episodically cinematic.

It's told in Eli's voice - thoughtful and innocent for a man who butchers people on demand - and filled with incident, dead ends and gold. I've read that some were disappointed with the ending, but I thought it perfectly pitched and strangely happy. It was very satisfying in the way that a really sour lemon sherbet is satisfying; it makes your eyes widen and your tongue tingle.

5. Sisters by a River by Barbara Comyns

(Virago Classics, 2013; first published 1947)

Not the same sisters obviously. Although that would be an interesting literary deathmatch, The Sisters Brothers vs the Sisters by the River. My money wouldn't necessarily be on Eli and Charlie.

Ooh look, I wrote a review post again! Huzzaaaaah! Back in January I described Comyns' writing as 'joyous, creepy, deadpan surrealism' and that still rings true in my memory; although the plot has thinned away, the disconcerting sensation of reading it is still pin-prick exact. Here is what I said then:

Sisters by a River is a cacophony of observation and of seeing. The scenes Barbara paints are unusually vivid, and beautiful; and they are the work of someone who has a palate for strangeness, for the surreal, for the dangerous. Whereas usually novels have elements of strangeness that creep in, Sisters by a River has elements of normality. Everyone and everything here is strange and sinister; when it is not strange, when it is not creepy, it is somehow out of place, creepier still. So that when Barbara describes a fairly ordinary Christmas with ordinary Christmas presents and an ordinary dinner we feel slightly off-balance, distrustful. Comyns has so successfully reoriented our vision that we see the world as it might appear refracted through the lens of Bosch or Dali.

It's very short, and was reprinted by Virago in July 2013, so you have no excuse for not seeking it out.

6. The Plot: A Biography of an English Acre by Madeleine Bunting

(Granta, 2010)

The only non-fiction book on my list, and one that kept me up reading into the night: a page turner about a piece of land on the North Yorkshire Moors. Its a delightful cornucopia of natural history, archaeology, travel writing, art criticism, biography and autobiography.

The author's father was the sculpture John Bunting, who spent years of his life hand building and decorating a private chapel on an acre of land he first visited as a schoolboy in 1942. He died in 2002, leaving it to his children. The book is about the moors, and about sculpture, about religious belief and doubt, about guilt and war and about the relationship between a difficult man and his family. After reading it Esther and I made a pilgrimage to see the place, which is still owned by the family, and I felt like I knew it from the page.

7. The Brides of Rollrock Island by Margo Lanagan

(David Fickling Books, February 2012)

I love me some creepy mermaids, and some remote islands, not to mention some fraught gender dynamics. This is my first foray into Lanagan, who broke into the mainstream with Tender Morsels a couple of years ago (but has been a star of the sff world since her short story collection Black Juice and before). That book has always frightened me - everyone I know who has read it seems traumatized by the experience - but this one sounded less devastating. Well, it was and it wasn't.

Rollrock island is a lonely rock of gulls and waves, blunt fishermen and their homely wives. Life is hard for the families who must wring a poor living from the stormy seas. But Rollrock is also a place of magic - the scary, salty-real sort of magic that changes lives forever. Down on the windswept beach, where the seals lie in herds, the outcast sea witch Misskaella casts her spells - and brings forth girls from the sea - girls with long, pale limbs and faces of haunting innocence and loveliness - the most enchantingly lovely girls the fishermen of Rollrock have ever seen.

But magic always has its price. A fisherman may have and hold a sea bride, and tell himself that he is her master. But from his first look into those wide, questioning, liquid eyes, he will be just as transformed as she is. He will be equally ensnared. And in the end the witch will always have her payment.

Lanagan's is a haunting age-old story of desperation and longing and revenge and love, and the nature of free will. She writes a clean chiselled poetic prose about a visceral bloody world that seems both impossibly strange and hyper real. I want more, and I don't at the same time.

8. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad

(First published 1899-1900; I read the Oxford World Classics edition, 2008)

Like Heart of Darkness but better (or better than my memory of Heart of Darkness). This is the book that I most regret not blogging about, because at the time it filled me with ideas that have inevitably faded. Never mind; I'll re-read it one day.

Conrad is a master of nested narrative, weaving so many he-said she-saids into this story about the eponymous anti-hero/actual hero that I emerged dizzy and squinting. Jim is the son of some undistinguished English clergyman, who seeks his fortune in the farthest reaches of the Empire only to disgrace himself in a single ignoble act. He abandons a sinking ship full of native passengers along with his captain and first mate, saving his own skin rather than trying to save everyone elses. Luckily for the passengers but unluckily for Jim the ship doesn't sink and when it makes port his cowardice is broadcast far and wide. In a devastating display of misplaced pride and shame Jim takes himself off into the jungle to atone, and let's just say things don't run smoothly.

I recognise that Conrad's tortured late 19th century prose stylings aren't for everyone. If you think Dickens is verbose and overwrought, Conrad is probably not for you, although the two writers couldn't be more different in their moral content.

9, 10 & 11. A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords: Steel and Snow by George R R Martin

(Harper Voyager, 1996, 1998, 2000)

I wasn't sure where these books would rank in my reading, so many years after I first encountered and loved them. There has been a TV series and world wide fandom since then, so who knew how they would stand up to a more critical gaze? I was aiming to read from A Game of Thrones right through to A Dance with Dragons in 2013 (the first three books being a reread) but in the event I lost momentum in the middle of book 3 part 1, exactly like I did years ago. For a while I thought I wouldn't be able to continue, but then I relocated my enthusiasm and finished it on Christmas eve. I'm starting to think 1500 pages is about my limit for one author in one go.

There is no denying that I enjoyed falling back into Westeros immensely. Even if epic fantasy isn't your cup of tea (it's mine, though I indulge only rarely these days) I would still give this series a try. GRRM has lots of pages to work with and so he can build a hugely complex world, geographically, politically, historically. He falls back on traditional medievalism for his culture and society, but I'm a medievalist and I don't see why he should apologise for it. A lot of my problems with the TV show, which I also love but which gives me the cringes sometimes, aren't in the book or mitigated by its complexity.

And George (after 1500 pages we are on first name terms again) can really rock dialogue. I could coast from one conversation to another quite merrily. And there are some seriously playful thematics too, espiecally in the third book. I particularly like the way he layers up the myth, folklore and legend of the Seven Kingdoms, and uses his multiple POV characters to lace rumour and doubt through the story. I am most definitely continuing the journey in the new year: in fact I've already read the first two chapters of A Storm of Swords: Blood and Gold.

Aha! Another book that I wrote about. 2013 was certainly the year that I discovered YA fiction. (I also read The Knife of Never Letting Go, the first book in Patrick Ness' Chaos Walking trilogy, which only didn't make my top books because of the most histrionic ending EVER. Jury is out on genius until I see where books 2 & 3 take me. Somewhere extremely depressing I imagine.) It was also the year of the wonderfulness of Frances Hardinge.

Caverna is a vast underground city, a claustrophobic, disoriented world unto itself. Its citizens are born, live and die in tunnels without ever seeing daylight or the warmth of the sun or the tug of the wind. Nobody leaves and people from the surface never come in.

The insularity of Caverna, and the proximity in which its people live, demands a stratifed, tightly structured society. Power is held entirely in the hands of a small number of families, Court artisans who create the True Delicacies and battle each other in an intense cycle of dynastic struggle. Meanwhile their water is pumped and their tunnels are dug and the trap lanterns that keep them alive are fed by the Drudges, a vast underclass of people who live and die in nameless obscurity.

In nameless and in faceless obscurity as well. In Caverna facial expressions do not come naturally to babies. They do not smile or frown or screw up their eyes in distaste. All children are born blank as slates. Each 'Face' or expression has to be taught and learnt. Beyond the five basic expressions taught to the Drudges - to give them the Faces for expectantly awaiting orders, politely carrying out a task, a smile of gratitude, humility when they have erred - Faces also have to be bought.

Into this world comes Neverfell, a girl who doesn't need Faces because she was born with them, an expressive freak amongst blank people, and a catalyst for revolutionary change underground.

13. Night Waking by Sarah Moss

(Granta, April 2012)

And finally, a book I read this week and which has just edged out Orkney by Amy Sackville (I don't feel too bad, because I wrote about it here). They are both are set on virtually deserted Scottish islands but the comparison ends there.

Imagine Peter May and Rachel Cusk wrote a book together, with a helping hand from Sarah Waters. Night Waking is that book. It's got mysterious baby skeletons dug up on Hebridean Islands; a two year old who refuses to sleep through the night; a half crazed mother wielding organic baby snacks while her husband counts puffins; and letters from a lonely 19th century nurse cut off from her family during a dark, cold winter. Which makes it hard to categorise: a motherhood thriller? More like a gender equality thriller. It's going to be my first proper review of 2014 I imagine.

It wasn't my first Sarah Moss book this year, as I also read her autobiographical travelogue Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland (and wrote about it briefly here.) This was about her own year of isolated living with two small children, and I imagine rather informed Night Waking. I'm very much looking forward to her next book, Bodies of Light, which is a companion piece of Night Waking and comes out from Granta in April 2014.

So there we have it: 13 books I would really love you to try. Eight by women, five by men (although three of those by the same man), continuing my incorrigible gender bias.

Hope you all had wonderful reading years too. I'll be back in the New Year with a post about my reading resolutions and another about the books I'm most anticipating, and also a review of Night Waking. But before that I'm off to spend New Year in Northumberland, on Hadrian's Wall, with The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton and a lot of leftover Christmas food.